The Ruthenian Cathloic Church: The Complete History (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798189558436)

The definitive history of a Catholic Church most American readers have never heard of - and the astonishing story of how it survived.

The Ruthenian Catholic Church is one of the oldest Eastern Catholic Churches in the world, and one of the least known. Rooted in the Byzantine Rite and centered on the Eparchy of Mukachevo in the Carpathian Mountains, this is the Church of the Carpatho-Rusyn people - a married priesthood, an ancient chant tradition, and a five-century fight simply to be allowed to exist.

This is the first complete, single-volume history ever written of that fight.

Inside, you'll find:

A martyred bishop. Theodore Romzha, poisoned by Soviet secret police in 1947 for refusing to surrender his Church to the state - one of two modern Ruthenian martyrs now beatified by Rome.

A church driven underground for forty years. Told through the fully documented lives of eighteen priests and religious who were arrested, tortured, exiled to the Gulag, and in several cases murdered by the KGB using the same staged "accident" used against their own bishop - for the simple crime of refusing to convert to state-controlled Orthodoxy.

A church divided by Rome's own broken promises. The 1929 celibacy decree that split the American church in two, and the saint - canonized not by Rome but by another church entirely - whose story proves exactly what that decree cost.

An immigrant story that shaped America. From coal-town Pennsylvania parishes to Andy Warhol's own childhood Byzantine Catholic parish in Pittsburgh, to the first Slavic-American Cabinet secretary baptized in its cathedral - the Carpatho-Rusyn story is quietly woven into American history far more than most readers realize.

A church still being written. From Soviet liquidation in 1949 to legalization in 1989 to ministering through the war in Ukraine today, this history carries all the way to the present.

Drawing on eparchial archives, Vatican documents, declassified Soviet-era records, and primary martyrology sources never before assembled into a single English-language history, The Ruthenian Catholic Church: The Complete History traces this Church from its ninth-century Byzantine-Slavic roots through the 1646 Union of Uzhhorod, the Habsburg era, the Holocaust in Carpathian Ruthenia, Soviet persecution, and its restoration and American growth into the twenty-first century.

Complete with a full register of bishops and eparchies, a five-century timeline, a glossary, and excerpts from the Divine Liturgy itself, this is both a serious work of history and an act of memory - for a people who were told, more than once, that their Church no longer existed, and who proved, every time, that it still did.

A Church that would not break. A history that had never been fully told - until now.